The full title of this BBC documentary is Down These Mean Streets a Man Must Go: A Portrait of Raymond Chandler. The film was broadcast in 1969, ten years after Chandler’s death, and has been on iPlayer recently to judge by the logo in the corner, but it’s not one I’d seen before. It would have been ideal viewing a couple of years ago during my attempt to watch all the films listed in The Big Noir Book. While working my way through the film list I was also reading some of Dashiell Hammett’s novels (The Maltese Falcon is excellent; The Dain Curse is terrible) and all of Raymond Chandler’s novels. Or almost all…I didn’t read Poodle Springs, his final book, left unfinished then completed by other hands. I enjoyed the Philip Marlowe novels so much I was tempted to start them all over again after I’d reached the end of Playback. Added to the enjoyment was the opportunity to see how much the books were mauled when they passed through the Hollywood mill. The BBC documentary opens with a clip from The Big Sleep which has always been the best of the adaptations (it can be difficult getting Humphrey Bogart out of your head when you’re reading Philip Marlowe’s narration) but even this one alters the story while downplaying the sexual content (homosexuality and pornography in the novel), something that all the films of the 40s do their best to avoid.
A Portrait of Raymond Chandler was written by John Foster and Fred Burnley who present the writer via his own words in a sequence of dramatised interviews and enactments of scenes from the novels. There’s also a brief interview with JB Priestley, an intriguing thing in itself as I’d no idea that Priestley knew Chandler. The enactments don’t work very well—all the very small and very English rooms look nothing like Los Angeles architecture—but Edward Judd makes a decent attempt to apply his hard-boiled manner to the detective role without any Bogart impersonations. Judd appeared throughout the 60s in a succession of science-fiction films, and the film works best when he’s reading from the novels. Omnibus used him for the voiceovers a few years later in another portrait of a writer, Fear and Loathing in Gonzovision, a film about Hunter S. Thompson. The Chandler documentary appeared just ahead of the wave of renewed Hollywood interest in the Marlowe books that broke in the 1970s. Among the film clips there’s a short scene from the soon-to-be-released Marlowe, an updated adaptation of The Little Sister which isn’t one of the best Marlowe films but it has some nice interior shots of the Bradbury Building, and you get to see Bruce Lee demolish James Garner’s office with his feet and fists.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Big Noir Book, or 300 films and counting…
Have you seen the South Bank episode on Chandler? As a younger man I was quite taken with it, and I still hear Robert Stephens’ voice whenever I think of Big Ray.
Yes, I saw the Chandler SBS although I haven’t seen it since it was broadcast, whenever that was. Robert Stephens must be one of the few actors who’s played Philip Marlowe and Sherlock Holmes.
I’ve found 3 or 4 Chandler audiobooks online read by Elliot Gould. I guess he’s done 7 (including Poodle Springs and the sequel to Big Sleep, Perchance to Dream); but due to some bad rights/money problems, they remain only available on cassette. As a fan of Altman’s The Long Goodbye, Gould is fantastic and superior to Bogart (at least to my ears).
Thanks, Jimpee. I prefer to read books rather than listen to them but I can imagine Gould being a good narrator. Robert Mitchum might have been good as well (although I doubt he would have wanted the job), he’s a decent Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely even though he’s too old for the role.
The best actor who “never played the role” but did a turn as a detective based on Marlowe was American character actor Darren MacGavin . See The Outsider from 1968.
The Dain Curse fails as a novel because it isn’t one other than being marketed as one.
It starts as a short story that was good enough and then for reasons unknown to me spun off a few sequels, none needed, warranted and each worse than the one before it. By the last story, it’s pretty much 100% WTF stuff.
On the other hand, I enjoyed the writing.
I’m curious why you disliked The Dain Curse. The version published in The Big Book of the Continental Op, which is the complete story as serialized, is better than the novel, in my opinion. It is very convoluted, but I enjoyed the numerous twists and turns.
Mainly because of all the twists and turns. I don’t mind complex storylines but beyond a certain point with this one I stopped caring. I also don’t like the hardboiled Continental Op prose style very much (I’ve read Red Harvest), The Maltese Falcon is much more to my taste.